Quiet and reclusive during the day, Rahul Zota doesn’t like to mingle with his peers. But as night falls, he comes alive. “I was born on earth but belong up in the sky. Only the stars are my friends,” says the 23-year-old who is all set to join a hundred others dotted around the foggy landscape of the Manora Peak at Nainital.

There is a party up on the hill, some 6,500-odd feet above sea level, he informs us and proudly unveils the 12-inch telescope that he bought three years back. “I have travelled all the way from Bhuj for this party. It’s a star party after all,” he says.

This is one of India’s first star parties, organised by a Delhi-based group of amateur astronomers and students called SPACE (Science Popularisation Association of Communicators and Educators). Both amateur and professional astronomers from across the country have gathered under one of India’s darkest skies, fighting the bitter cold of 2 degrees Celsius. Far from the sodium glow of streetlights, they are here to sight their celestial friends and exchange notes — three nights of just gazing at the sky through India’s biggest amateur telescope that was unveiled at the Aryabhatta Research institute of Observational Sciences yesterday.

While such parties are quite popular in the UK and the US, Sachin Bahmba, one of the founding members of SPACE, says the concept is still new in India. “While one-fifth of the world’s population cannot even see the stars anymore, India still has a huge resource in it’s non-urban regions,” he says.

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